The communications downlink between a satellite and its ground station often has a maximum data rate limit that is a fraction of what the satellite is capable of sourcing. Satellite Payload Mission Processors (PMPs) are used on board the satellites to collect, transform, and forward digital data streams from multiple sensors located on board. Each of these data streams can vary in data rate and duration depending on the data source and the mission profile.
The data streams need to be framed to establish a time epoch as well as rate-adapted in a flexible and efficient manner in order to aggregate the maximum efficiency in bandwidth of an active number of data streams onto the downlink. Furthermore, a ground controller may change the bits of significance or data rate of one or more of the digital data streams being collected during a mission. To quickly facilitate such a change, it is desirable to reconfigure only the PMP and have the rest of the data stream processing electronics use information embedded in each data stream to automatically reconfigure and adapt to such a change in the digital data stream's content and data rate with minimal data loss.